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The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

What fools these mortals be

Some birthday present. On Monday, the putative birthday of William Shakespeare, a national academic watchdog group released a survey lamenting the decline in the number of the most prestigious American universities that require a course in Shakespeare for English majors. The findings are truly lamentable. Of the 70 "top colleges" surveyed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, just 15 require a course in the works of the most influential author and most popular playwright of all time -- and many of those who graduate without such a background will become the high school and college English teachers of tomorrow.

First, let's clear up that matter of birthdays. April 23 is the generally agreed upon date for Shakespeare's birth, based on two known dates. He was baptized April 26, 1564, and would most likely have been born within a week before that. When he died, on April 23, 1616, his age was given as 53 -- meaning, in those days, that he was in his 53rd year, and thus had to have been born on or before the 23rd. Some scholars prefer April 22 as more likely, but the serendipity of identical birth and death dates, and of England's literary giant being born on St. George's Day, trump all other factors.

Now the good news: Only two Bay Area universities were even surveyed -- UC Berkeley and Stanford, obviously -- and both are among the minority maintaining higher standards. Harvard remains credible, as well, as do Wellesley, Smith and UCLA. But the schools that have let things slide include such notable names as Amherst, Cornell, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Purdue, Vassar and Bryn Mawr. As the report states, "A degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. ... It is tantamount to fraud."

Not that Shakespeare is in any danger of disappearing from our cultural landscape. His works continue to dominate American stages by a factor of at least 10-to-1 over any other playwright. There are summer Shakespeare festivals just about everywhere you look, with at least 18 in Northern California alone. But parents of college-age sons and daughters should take heed: Looks as if your literary-minded scholar-to-be can get a better education at Stanford or Berkeley than at Bard-snubbing Columbia, Princeton or Yale.

It's easy enough to follow the advice above. Every English department in the country has a website--and most of them post detailed descriptions of their major requirements as well as their course offerings. Parents and prospective students should be selective, proactive, and persistent in their search for academic settings that live up to their promises--and they should not be fooled into assuming that an elite institutional "brand name" guarantees quality.

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"Free Exchange," the AFT, and the facts

A group with the unfitting name "Free Exchange on Campus" recently published a remarkably inaccurate manifesto--"The American Council of Trustees and Alumni's 'Intellectual Diversity' Agenda"--on ACTA. This document, penned by a staff member of the American Federation of Teachers, amounts to a shameless use of the Internet to disseminate nonsense. It is riddled with factual errors, sloppy research, gross misrepresentations, and inaccurate characterizations. And most troublingly, underneath all the intellectually dishonest verbiage lies the group's deeply entrenched belief that academics should not have to answer to the people.

"Free Exchange" describes itself as a coalition "committed to advocating for the rights of students and faculty to hear and express a full range of ideas unencumbered by political or ideological interference." This coalition includes the AFT, as well as the American Association of University Professors, the National Education Association, the National Association of State PIRGS, the People for the American Way Foundation, and the United States Student Association.

ACTA believes that the academy has a "duty...to the wider public" (to use the words of the AAUP's 1915 "Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure") that includes accuracy and fairness in the material it distributes. Higher education administrators, government officials, legislators, parents, students, teachers, and the general public should be on notice: "Free Exchange" is not for free or accurate exchange.

Here are just a few of the inaccuracies:

ACTA's Founding: ACTA was founded by a diverse group of prominent intellectuals and policy makers from across the political spectrum. They included former National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Lynne V. Cheney, former Colorado governor Richard D. Lamm, distinguished social scientist David Riesman, and Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow. Despite ACTA's notification some time ago that the information is false, a widely read "transparency" website inaccurately claims that the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was a founder. "Free Exchange" has repeated this inaccuracy without bothering to verify the facts.

ACTA's Leadership: Higher education reform is not a partisan issue. ACTA's supporters represent a range of perspectives. Members of our National Council include Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic; Hans Mark, secretary of the Air Force in the Carter administration and a former chancellor of the University of Texas; and Max M. Kampelman, who worked for Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and was appointed to an ambassadorship by President Carter. To suggest that ACTA is not bipartisan underscores how ideologically confused "Free Exchange" apparently is.

ACTA's Mission: "Free Exchange" claims that ACTA seeks to "restrict the free exchange of ideas at colleges and universities, ... launching an ideological attack on higher education, painting U.S. colleges and universities as biased institutions where naive students are indoctrinated by liberal professors who shun opposing views." In fact, ACTA's publicly stated mission is to "to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically-balanced, open-minded, high-quality education at an affordable price."

ACTA's Reports: "Free Exchange" tries to discredit two of ACTA's recent reports by citing a controversial January 2007 publication entitled "The 'Faculty Bias' Studies: Science or Propaganda?" Authored by John B. Lee, an education researcher and consultant, and sponsored by the AFT, this document argues that studies claiming a lack of intellectual diversity in higher education--including ACTA's Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action and How Many Ward Churchills?--are mere "propaganda." As ACTA pointed out to Inside Higher Ed, Lee's findings are "severely flawed." His report confuses and conflates two separate ACTA reports--Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action and Politics in the Classroom. It also faults both reports for not being scientific studies, though neither ever claimed to be such. The former was a collection of suggestions for trustees and other stakeholders; the latter summarized a review of course descriptions and other publicly available materials at colleges across the country.

Smith also claims another ACTA report--Defending Civilization, which catalogued statements made by faculty members in the wake of the September 11 attacks--"is tantamount to blacklisting anyone who questions mainstream thinking during any given historical period." This is patently untrue.

The report explicitly defends the academic freedom of professors in the academy. Indeed, ACTA's concluding plea was positively uncontroversial: "It is urgent that students and professors who support the war against terrorism, as well as those who are opposed, not be intimidated. If both sides are heard, students and all of us benefit." That such a basic endorsement of the free exchange of views could be so falsely characterized by "Free Exchange" raises disturbing questions about the group's genuine embrace of such exchange.

ACTA has never interfered with anyone's right to speak. It has never urged censure or punishment of academics for simply expressing their views. To the contrary, it has issued public statements defending the academic due process rights of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill and others who have expressed controversial views, while emphasizing the correlative obligation in the classroom to abide by accepted scholarly standards. By equating criticism and censorship, "Free Exchange" underscores a real threat to academic freedom: academics' own effort to redefine academic freedom as synonymous with freedom from accountability.

Legislative Matters: For years, ACTA has been calling on colleges and universities to address voluntarily mounting public concerns about academic quality, academic freedom, and accountability. But time after time, the academy has denied that there is a problem. That's why--when approached by concerned legislators--ACTA helped draft model bills to address these issues responsibly. The intellectual diversity model bill under consideration in Missouri and other states requires institutions to report on what concrete steps they have taken to ensure academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas on campus. The legislation does not dictate what steps colleges and universities must take to do this, leaving them free to devise their own means of defining and addressing the issue. As such, the legislation is scrupulously respectful of institutional autonomy while still responding to institutions' continuing failure to guarantee academic freedom. If colleges and universities were voluntarily meeting their obligation on this front, legislation of the sort proposed in Missouri and elsewhere would not be necessary.

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The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

From The Daily Oklahoman, which was inspired by ACTA's Vanishing Shakespeare report to research English major requirements at state schools:

No university in Oklahoma was part of the report, but The Oklahoman found state campuses have mixed requirements on Shakespeare.

Kathryn McGill, artistic director of Oklahoma Shakespeare in the Park, said she was surprised the works of Shakespeare aren't mandated for all English students. "He has been more influential to the English language than any other writer," she said.

University of Central Oklahoma
Requires English majors and minors to take at least one course in Shakespeare.
UCO professor Sandra Mayfield said she can't imagine not requiring Shakespeare of English majors. She thinks such a class should be a general education requirement of all students. "Shakespeare was the best writer in the English language," Mayfield said. "So much later literature alludes to characters in Shakespeare's plays. It really teaches the value of language, thinking in terms of metaphors."

Oklahoma State University
Mandates Shakespeare courses only for English majors getting a teaching certificate in English.
Carol Moder, head of OSU's English department, said Shakespeare used to be required of all English majors but the curriculum changed several years ago "to bring the requirements more into line with developments in the field, which allow for more thematically based courses and greater diversity in the authors studied."

"The reason for allowing other students to choose whether to take Shakespeare is to allow them greater flexibility in developing their course work to meet their career goals," Moder said.

University of Oklahoma
Does not require Shakespeare courses for undergrads.
Shakespeare is a popular elective at OU, professor Alan Velie said. While he thinks all students ought to study Shakespeare, he thinks the number of required classes should be kept to a minimum. "I think our majors should know the great American authors as well, and the Bible, but we would not require courses on those subjects either," Velie said.

The Oklahoman also includes a fun pop quiz. Feel free to post your answers in the comments--and no using Google to cheat!

A quiz: Can you match the quote with the play?
1. "To be, or not to be; that is the question."

2. "Now is the winter of our discontent."

3. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

4. "Why, then the world's mine oyster."

5. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

6 . "Et tu, Brute!"

7. "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble."

8. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, rounded with a little sleep."

9. "This above all: to thine own self be true."

10 . "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!"

Enjoy!

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The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

From the editors of The Weekly Standard, as reprinted in the New York Post:

Today marks William Shakespeare's 443rd birthday. He's getting old, in other words, which may explain why the ever-youthful, forever hip Baby Boomers who now control our nation's colleges and universities have decided he's not worth bothering about.

The indispensable American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released a report about the status of Shakespeare in higher education, and the results, you won't be surprised to learn, are deeply depressing. ACTA surveyed English departments at Big Ten schools, the top 25 liberal arts colleges and U.S. News & World Report's 25 highest ranking universities.

Only 15 of them require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare. In 1996, in last similar survey [sic], 23 of 70 top schools had a Shakespeare requirement.

So what are the faculty teaching instead? Well, if you're lucky enough to be an English major at Northwestern, you can ogle a course on TV's Baywatch, starring Pamela Anderson, who's a Globe Theater all to herself. At the University of Pennsylvania, you can take a class on "radical vegetarian manifestos"; at Yale, you can study Lemony Snicket ("A Series of Unfortunate Events") and Dr. Suess; at Duke you can get credit for "Creepy Kids in Fiction and Film." Then you can pocket your English B.A. and escape Shakespeare altogether.

The effects of this outrageous negligence will trickle down, as graduates ignorant of Shakespeare go off to teach English to high school students, who will themselves remain ignorant of Western civilization's crowning glory. "It's easy to imagine a day," the ACTA report concludes, "when schoolteachers will not have read Shakespeare and will not teach him." And then there will be no one left to quote Duke Senior from "As You Like It": "True it is that we have seen better days."

Read ACTA's Vanishing Shakespeare report here.

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The Shakespeare buzz, contd.

From Stanley Kurtz, writing at The Corner:

Are we past caring about the havoc wrought on liberal education by the contemporary professorate? Today is Shakespeare's birthday. Yet I worry that even this latest news on the disappearance of Shakespeare will be greeted with a yawn. Maybe not. Some may find it troubling that only a few schools still require English majors to study Shakespeare. It's certainly a development worth being troubled about.

A new website, vanishingshakespeare.org, has been created to address the problem. Here you'll find the full report on "The Vanishing Shakespeare." It's especially worth having a look at sections two and three, "The Advance of the Not-So-Great" and "What You Can Do." (These are quick and easy reads.) The rest of the report allows you to check to see if you're alma mater, or your children's school, require English majors to study Shakespeare.

To grasp the true source of the vanishing Shakespeare, read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. .... For the beginnings of a solution, consider this passage from page 56 of Allan Bloom's "Giants and Dwarfs":

...when Shakespeare is read naively, because he shows most comprehensively the fate of tyrants, the character of good rulers, the relations of friends, and the duties of citizens, he can move the souls of his readers, and they recognize that they have understood life better because they have read him; he hence becomes a constant guide and companion. He is turned to as the Bible was once turned to; one sees the world, enriched and embellished, through his eyes. It is this perspective that has been lost; and only when Shakespeare is taught as though he said something can he regain the influence over this generation which is so needed–needed for the sake of giving us some thoughtful views on the most important questions. The proper functions of criticism are, therefore, to recover Shakespeare's teaching and to be the agent of his ever-continuing education of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Bloom is saying that the way we now study Shakespeare is as much of a problem as the fact that we study him so rarely. Indeed the way we now study Shakespeare explains why the study itself is vanishing. As Bloom puts it on page 374 of The Closing of the American Mind:

There is an enormous difference between saying, as teachers once did, 'You must learn to see the world as Homer and Shakespeare did,' and saying, as teachers now do, 'Homer and Shakespeare had some of the same concerns you do and can enrich your vision of the world.' In the former approach students are challenged to discover new experiences and reassess old; in the latter, they are free to use the books in any way they please.

Having thus transferred authority from the book (and the shared tradition the book embodies) to the student, the notion of requiring some texts but not others ceases to make sense.

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The Shakespeare buzz

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has a sharp and incisive piece on ACTA's new report, The Vanishing Shakespeare:

A new report contends that fewer and fewer college English majors are being required to study Shakespeare. In a 60-page report titled "The Vanishing Shakespeare," the non-profit American Council of Trustees and Alumni reports that only 15 of the 70 colleges and universities it examined require their English majors to take a Shakespeare course.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, the only Wisconsin school surveyed, is one of just three in the Big Ten to require Shakespeare, according to the council. Marquette University, not mentioned in the report, also requires that English majors take a Shakespeare course.

The tone of the new report is nothing if not dramatic.

"If reading Shakespeare is not central to a liberal education, what is?" the authors ask, adding, "A degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud."

But others dismiss such thinking as intellectual hysteria, expressing a view of the report best summed up with the Bard's own words: "It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing."

"I can't imagine the study of Shakespeare has diminished in any way," says Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, a Manhattan-based humanities organization. "I look at curricula all the time, and I know that English majors are reading Shakespeare. I have absolutely no doubt about that."

"You have a real paradox here," says Tom McBride, who has taught Shakespeare for more than 30 years at Beloit College, where the subject is not required.

"On the one hand, Shakespeare is bigger than ever. You have movies based on Shakespeare's plays. He is a huge, huge factor in our culture. On the other hand, you can go to Barnes & Noble and buy books called 'Shakespeare Made Easy.' They are like modern editions of the Bible that turn everything into American, easy-to-understand English."

The debate over Shakespeare goes to the heart of a much larger struggle for identity and mission at colleges and universities.

On one side are those who believe that institutions have so fully embraced pop culture, diversity and social/political issues of every flavor that they are watering down what's truly important and failing to stress the classics. On the other side stand those who believe universities must broaden their offerings to remain relevant, and that such efforts pose no threat to the Big Three: Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton.

"I really do think we're at a crossroads in academia and we're having a tough time making the call," says Curran, of Marquette. "We want to be welcoming to new areas, but we do want to be held accountable and produce English majors who are really English majors."

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has been an especially active participant in this larger debate.

Founded in 1995 by a group that included Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and Lynne V. Cheney, wife of the vice president, the council says it is committed to "academic freedom, excellence and accountability" in higher education. Its report on Shakespeare goes well beyond the lack of course requirements, targeting new literature courses that "address a multiplicity of non-literary topics," including adoption, AIDS, film noir, "Baywatch" and Madonna.

"Essentially a course in Shakespeare counts the same as these courses," says Anne D. Neal, president of the council. "But to leave Shakespeare out of one's education is a serious disservice to these students. The college curriculum has essentially become a do-it-yourself kit."

Feal, of the Modern Language Association, believes those at the council suffer from "a nostalgia for a kind of literary studies frozen in time. . . . New learning, new scholarship and new ways of teaching are not automatically suspect." She points to the enormous popularity of Stephen Greenblatt's biography "Will in the World," and predicts that large numbers of students will continue to study Shakespeare whether or not it is required.

McBride would prefer mandatory Shakespeare, not only for the English majors but for all students at Beloit College.

"In order to be culturally literate, you really have to be exposed to the greatest writer who ever lived," he says.

UW-Madison associate professor Henry S. Turner has taught Shakespeare since 2000 and says there is a simple reason why the author is a requirement for English majors.

"Every discipline needs some fundamentals," he says. "Shakespeare is fundamental. A lot of people would rightly say that he is the most influential writer in English."

That is the very reason Marquette English major Stephen McDonald supports his school's Shakespeare requirement. Many of the great writers who came to prominence after Shakespeare's death in 1616 have referred to his plays in their own work.

"In order to understand them," says McDonald, "one should look at the original."

As is so often the case, Shakespeare says it best himself: "Strong reasons make strong actions."

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Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!

All across America, colleges and universities are forgetting Shakespeare's birthday. In fact, they are forgetting Shakespeare himself: As ACTA's new study shows, the number of English departments that require their majors to take a Shakespeare course is vanishingly small, and is decreasing all the time.

Today, ACTA is honoring Shakespeare's birthday with an urge to remembrance--and an argument for his return to the list of required reading for English majors in America--with the launch of a new website, www.vanishing shakespeare.org. The site links to ACTA's new report, The Vanishing Shakespeare, as well as to a host of additional resources, including the Folger Shakespeare Library's new Shakespeare in American Life site, where you can listen to a radio documentary featuring ACTA president Anne D. Neal discussing the disappearance of Shakespeare from the college curriculum.

"Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear." -- All's Well That Ends Well

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Something is rotten

Should English majors study Shakespeare? Should that even be a question? ACTA's latest study, The Vanishing Shakespeare, reveals that what looks like a no-brainer is actually a serious and troubling conundrum.

ACTA surveyed 70 top colleges and universities to see which ones required English majors to take a course in Shakespeare--and found that only 15 of them did. What are English majors studying instead? Just about anything you can think of. At the vast majority of colleges and universities surveyed, a course on Shakespeare counts the same as a course on hip hop, horror movies, food, politics, children's literature, sociology, and sex. Shakespeare has become simply one choice among many, an elective on material that matters no more and no less than the most trivial, trendy, and non-literary material.

What does the disappearance of Shakespeare from English major requirements say about the character and quality of undergraduate English education? Read the report to find out.

The national media is taking notice--USA Today featured ACTA's report yesterday. Students, parents, trustees, legislators, academic administrators, and anyone else who cares about the quality of undergraduate education in this country should, too.

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Virginia Tech

ACTA is shocked and sickened by today's events at Virginia Tech. Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Virginia Tech community, on campus and beyond.

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Georgia Tech student responds

As Georgia considers implementing an intellectual diversity bill, students are speaking out about their experiences--good and bad--on the state's campuses. One of them is Ruth Malhotra, who received death threats after she and a fellow Georgia Tech student sued the university for violating their free speech rights.

Here is what Malhotra has to say about the Georgia bill:

On April 11, the Georgia House Higher Education Committee held a hearing regarding HB 154-the Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education Act. I, along with other students from universities around the state, testified in favor of this legislation, which would hold our institutions accountable for taking concrete steps to implement intellectual diversity on campus.

As a student for the past five years, I have witnessed the politicization of campus far too often and have been forced to fight for academic freedom time and again at a school usually known more for technological research than political controversy.

I came to Tech in 2002, excited about attending a school with a solid reputation for academic excellence, time-honored traditions and global impact. I looked forward to an intellectually honest environment where scholarly debate and open dialogue flourished both in the classroom and on campus. While I expected to have my abilities and beliefs challenged, I did not expect to be repeatedly censored, interrogated and condemned by those in authority for expressing a point of view that was not lockstep in line with their own political agenda.

That is not the education I am paying for-or what I came here for. In fact, it's not education at all. But, unfortunately, it is part of a toxic environment here in terms of the marketplace of ideas. Worse, this toxic environment is present from the top down and affects virtually every aspect of the Institute-from the senior administrators who refuse to admit (let alone address) any problems, to the unfortunate number of faculty who replace teaching their subjects with preaching their politics, to the students who have issued so many death threats against me that I now need police escorts to go to class.

The Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education Act will help address such campus abuses both within and beyond Tech. It would bring accountability to administrations and professors who operate with impunity now, ignoring both the Constitution and their own professional standards.

Fellow students, we deserve better for our money. And so do Georgia's taxpayers. That's why I support HB 154-a measure that would simply require our public universities to issue an annual report on what they're doing to make certain we can speak our minds.

Some are strongly opposed to legislation of the sort Georgia is considering. But there is a bottom line: As ACTA president Anne Neal said of a similar bill under consideration in Missouri, "If institutions adequately addressed these issues voluntarily, legislation of the sort proposed in Missouri and elsewhere would not be necessary."

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Missouri House approves HB 213

ACTA's latest press release:

JEFFERSON CITY, MO (April 12, 2007) -- The Missouri House of Representatives today passed House Bill 213, as amended, which seeks to ensure a free exchange of ideas on the state's public university campuses. Provisions in the original legislation were drawn from Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

"For years, the academic establishment has refused to take action to protect the free exchange of ideas," said ACTA president Anne D. Neal. "It is no wonder that now, confronted with real problems, Missouri legislators have asked for a measure of accountability."

The vote was 97 to 50 on the third reading. The bill earned preliminary approval on a voice vote yesterday, following various amendments from the floor. It goes next to the Senate.

House Bill 213, as amended, will require Missouri's public universities to report annually on specific steps taken to "to ensure and promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom." Institutions must post the report on their website and ensure that students are notified of the measures taken as well as how to report alleged violations of policy. The bill's sponsor is Representative Jane Cunningham.

The bill defines intellectual diversity as "the foundation of a learning environment that exposes students to a variety of political, ideological, religious, and other perspectives, when such perspectives relate to the subject matter being taught or issues being discussed."

It includes suggested actions universities can take, including several added by amendments on the floor--none of which are mandatory. The content of the report is entirely up to each institution.

The vote comes in the wake of a poll--commissioned by ACTA--of undergraduates at Missouri's two largest public campuses. Results were presented in ACTA's testimony earlier this year on the bill before the House Higher Education Committee. They included:

--58.7 percent of the students reported that "some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views";

--56.8 percent reported courses that "have readings which present only one side of a controversial issue"; and

--51 percent of the students reported "courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade."

The vote also follows the release last week of a report offering a scathing indictment of classroom practices in the social work program at Missouri State University. HB 213 is named for Emily Brooker, a student who was singled out for punishment by school officials at the MSU program after she refused to sign a letter to the state legislature advocating a public policy her professor agreed with--but she did not.

In response to her case, the university had an independent study done by outside experts. The external reviewers noted "an atmosphere where [policies are] used in order to coerce students into certain belief systems" and "to bully and browbeat students." The report found that: "Faculty appear wedded to old history and grudges. Some faculty and students do not feel safe. This toxic environment permeates every aspect of the School."

Since last year, legislation similar to HB 213 has been introduced in six states. The Missouri measure has also been endorsed by the chief executive of the Kansas City Public Library, a curator of the University of Missouri, and a former president of the University of Missouri Alumni Association.

A reporting requirement similar to that of HB 213 is already in place in Pennsylvania, approved last year by a special bipartisan committee following testimony by ACTA. The South Dakota Board of Regents also took action last year, requiring all public university professors to notify students on syllabi that their "academic performance may be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards.

"ACTA has said for years that the public wants action--not words--given the sorry state of the marketplace of ideas on our campuses," Neal concluded. "Today's news from Missouri is more evidence of that. Rather than waiting for legislatures to demand accountability, I hope more colleges and universities will take action themselves in the future."

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is a bipartisan, national nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality, and accountability in higher education. ACTA has a network of trustees and alumni around the country and has issued numerous reports including How Many Ward Churchills?, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, The Hollow Core, and Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. For further information, contact ACTA at 202-467-6787 or visit www.goacta.org.

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Sending in the bill

Yesterday, the Georgia House Higher Education Committee heard arguments for and against a proposed intellectual diversity bill. Architected by ACTA and the American Legislative Exchange Council, HB 154 would require public universities to report annually on the steps they are taking to ensure the free exchange of ideas on campus; it follows hard on the heels of a scandal that gained national attention last year when Georgia Tech students Ruth Malhotra and Orit Sklar sued the university for violating students' expressive and associative rights.

Meanwhile, a similar bill was approved by voice vote yesterday by the Missouri House. While some objected to the bill as meddlesome, a majority saw it for what it is: a reasonable and flexible reporting requirement, and nothing more:

Rep. Ed Robb, R-Columbia, said he was inclined to vote for the bill. He noted that the bill would only require schools to provide information to the General Assembly and students, and would not require institutions to implement certain policies.

"The bill is nothing but mays, as opposed to a shalls," Robb said. "They may do this, they may do that. The only thing that they shall do is report what they actually did. The Board of Curators at the University of Missouri doesn’t have a problem about that."

There is a lot of noise being made about these bills, as academic insiders bewail what they consider to be an assault on their academic freedom. But, as Cobb notes, it really is very simple and very straightforward. And, as recent events in Missouri make clear, it also addresses a real problem.

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Where there's smoke ...

As the Missouri state legislature prepares to vote on HB 213, Missouri State University has released a report that underlines the need for it. HB 213 would require Missouri's public universities to make a public accounting of the steps they are taking to ensure that intellectual diversity is encouraged and respected on campus -- it's a means of compelling schools to pay closer attention to a long-neglected issue while at the same time affording them freedom to determine how they define intellectual diversity, how they measure it, and how they assess it. Opponents of HB 213 have argued that there is no need for it because there is no problem; when confronted with the case of Emily Brooker, the Missouri State social work student who was first compelled to write a letter to the state legislature supporting gay adoption and then disciplined for refusing to sign it, HB 213 opponents suggest that this is an isolated case, and that there is no need for the state to become involved in the operations of the state university system.

To its great credit, Missouri State is itself putting an end to that argument. In a remarkably good faith gesture of public accountability, MSU not only commissioned an external audit of its social work program, but released the results.

"It is as negative a review of an academic program as I have ever seen, and I have been involved in University accreditation activities for more than 20 years as a site visitor for the American Psychological Association, an accreditation consultant, a commissioner of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and a reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission," MSU president Mike Nietzel writes. "As much as I am embarrassed by the report, I have decided it must be made public. The perceived problems in Social Work are too numerous and too serious to hide or diminish. I believe we owe it to ourselves and to our students to let the sun shine on what is very tempting to keep under the rug."

The News-Leader has the details:

Missouri State University's social work program could be terminated as a result of an external report that found the program operating in a "toxic environment" that includes bullying students, bias against them based on their faith and an incredible lack of faculty productivity.

MSU President Mike Nietzel issued that warning Thursday after he released a blistering external review of the program that found it had a "long history of inner conflict and dysfunction."

He called the report, conducted by Karen Sowers, dean of the College of Social Work at the University of Tennessee, and Michael Patchner, dean of the School of Social Work at Indiana University, "as negative a review of an academic program as I have ever seen."

The social work faculty has until May 1 to come up with a workable plan for restoring integrity to the program. If it can't, it faces dismantling.

Among other things, the report notes that the social work program tends to coerce students into accepting a particular belief system, discriminates against religious students, and misleads students in a range of ways. The report also found that the faculty are unproductive, meddlesome, and, in some cases, given to bullying. The report's final assessment is chilliing: "Neither of the reviewers have ever witnessed such a negative, hostile and mean work environment."

Currently, MSU is considering several stopgap measures, including postponing the social work program's accreditation review (which Nietzel acknowledges the program could not currently pass) and freezing tenure cases and hiring.

There should be no doubt now that Emily Brooker's case was hardly isolated; it was, in fact, symptomatic of larger systemic problems that had gone unacknowledged and unchecked to the point of doing enormous damage both to the educational experience of students and to the credibility of MSU.

It should be a wakeup call to the state legislature that the present system is not working and that something needs to be done.

Posted by acta online at 10:58 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Gone fishing

Stanley Fish wrote an op-ed for the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that both recognizes a fundamental problem with contemporary academe and denies it exists.

Fish opens with the tale of Emily Brooker, a Missouri State University student who was required, as part of a social work course, to write a letter to the state legislature supporting gay adoption. Brooker wrote the letter, but refused to sign it on the grounds that it conflicted with her beliefs. The school responded by convening a committee of faculty and students to determine whether she was fit to pursue social work. Brooker sued with the aid of David French and the Alliance Defense Fund, and Missouri State settled out of court.

Fish uses Brooker's case to both deplore the manner in which Missouri State confused advocacy with education, and to argue--utterly counterintuitively--that there is no problem with how Missouri State comports itself:

...what the professor was requiring of his class was public advocacy, and it doesn't matter whether an individual student would have approved of the advocacy; advocacy is just not what should be going on in a university.

Once advocacy is removed from the equation -- once issues, including gay adoption, are objects of study rather than alternatives to be embraced -- the beliefs, religious or otherwise, of either students or professors, become irrelevant.

A student assigned to study an issue must be equipped with the appropriate analytical skills. Acquiring and applying those skills in no way depend on political or ideological affiliations. If the assignment is to give an account of the dispute about gay adoption rather than to come down on one side or the other, two students with opposing views of the matter might very well produce the very same account. Academic performance and individual beliefs are independent variables. They have nothing to do with each other.

If the distinction between studying and advocating were honored, there would be no need for Provision J of House Bill 213, which deals with ''conflicts between personal beliefs and classroom assignments.'' There could be no such conflicts if classroom assignments asked students to analyze an issue rather than pronounce on it; no one's personal beliefs about anything would be in play.

Not only is Provision J beside the point; the entire bill is beside the point because it addresses a problem that should never arise, and proposes a remedy no different from the disease it claims to cure. Under House Bill 213, institutions of higher education would be required to report each year on their efforts ''to ensure and promote intellectual diversity.''

''Intellectual diversity'' ... mandates the proportional representation, on the faculty and in the curriculum, of conservatives and liberals. Its watchword is ''balance,'' but balance is a political measure, not an educational measure, for it could be achieved only by monitoring the political affiliations of professors and the political content of the materials they assign.

Coming from a critic as savvy as Fish, the doublethink here is disappointing, to say the least.

First, there is the serious error of fact: "Intellectual diversity" as envisioned by the bill Fish cites and as discussed by ACTA in the report that underwrites the bill, has absolutely nothing to do with "mandat[ing] the proportional representation, on the faculty and in the curriculum, of conservatives and liberals." Quotas are very far from the spirit of either the bill or ACTA's work. The aim is ending viewpoint discrimination--and "intellectual diversity" expresses that aim.

Second, there is Fish's clumsy shell game. Does Fish not see the contradiction in his argument? That's doubtful. Does he expect his readers won't see it? If so, that's shameful.

In any case, readers did notice it, and they did write to the Times about it. Here's what ACTA president Anne Neal had to say:

Far from refuting the need for legislative oversight of higher education, Stanley Fish's "Advocacy and Teaching" (March 24) underscores it.

Fish claims a bill requiring public universities to report on steps taken to ensure intellectual diversity, is "beside the point because it addresses a problem that should never arise." As Fish admits, however, the problem of "advocacy" in the classroom does arise -- as it did in the case of Emily Brooker.

Advocacy passes for teaching in far too many classrooms, as a new poll cited by legislators made clear: Fifty-one percent of undergraduates at Missouri's two largest public universities reported pressure to agree with professors' views to get good grades; nearly 60 percent said professors use classrooms to present personal political views.

Of course, the academy could address the problem voluntarily. But, as Fish illustrates, it refuses. In the face of continuing denial, no wonder legislators are asking for accountability before writing another blank check.

Unfortunately, the Times did not print Neal's letter.

But her take meshes with those of others who are in a position to assess what Fish is saying. Here's what David French has to say about Fish's article: "If the distinction between studying and advocating were honored of course there would be no need for the bill, but it's not honored. In fact, that distinction is too often regarded as a small-minded nuisance in the 'speak truth to power' modern academy. The bill exists because the academy has betrayed its obligations, not as a superfluous add-on to remind professors of the things they are already doing."

Posted by acta online at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

French on Finkelstein

Writing at Phi Beta Cons, David French echoes the sentiments expressed on this blog yesterday regarding DePaul's unfortunate evocation of collegiality criteria in Norman Finkelstein's tenure case:

... it is dangerous to fundamental principles of academic freedom and free speech to make a professor's entire academic career hinge upon something so ephemeral as "civility." By any fair definition of the term, Finkelstein is uncivil--even vicious--towards his critics. Yet just as bad facts make bad law, so does bad behavior set bad precedents. In the modern academy "civility" is all too often defined simply as hewing to the standard left-liberal line on any given issue.

I can't express an educated opinion about Finkelstein's tenure bid. I haven't read any of his "serious" scholarship, nor do I have any knowledge about his qualities as a teacher (though I must confess that I find it more chilling than encouraging to hear that some of his students apparently describe his class as "transformative"), and I certainly don't have any idea how he interacts with colleagues and students at the university. But one thing is clear: If DePaul denies tenure over "civility," then academic freedom loses, and no one will feel that loss more than those most outside the campus ideological mainstream--conservatives (especially religious conservatives).

It's quite clear what DePaul ought to do, or at least what it ought not to do. But this is the school that suspended Thomas Klocek when some pro-Palestinian students complained that his disagreement with them offended them. Anything is possible.

Posted by acta online at 12:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Dartmouth election the wave of the future?

The bureaucratic ins and outs of academic governance, alumni associations, and so on aren't usually the stuff of exciting news and don't usually attract much attention. But Dartmouth's current trustee election, in which alumni will vote to place a Dartmouth alum on the board, has proven to be a telling exception to this rule.

Glenn Reynolds has offered some opinions about the watershed moment that Dartmouth's election exemplifies. And now the Boston Globe is following the story--which includes the controversy surrounding the story--with close and careful interest:

According to one faction, a shadowy cabal of conservatives is waging a war of misinformation to take over the board of trustees of Dartmouth College.

According to the other, devoted alumni are fighting an administration that has neglected undergraduate education in favor of research, let athletic teams languish, and cracked down unfairly on fraternities.

Voting begins this week for an alumni representative to the board, the latest battle in a fight that may prove influential around the country. Is Dartmouth the first domino in a national war on the allegedly liberal, politically correct Ivory Tower? Or is it an inspiration to alumni not to stay on the sidelines?

At the Hanover, N.H., school, alumni elect half of the trustees, an unusual setup, and the board appoints the rest. For most of Dartmouth’s history, an alumni council nominated all candidates, and they tended to be palatable to the administration. But a clause little used until recent years allows a petition candidate to run if he or she gathers 500 signatures from fellow alumni.

In the last two elections, in 2004 and 2005, petition candidates who criticized Dartmouth’s direction and boasted conservative or libertarian credentials won the three open seats.

"Too often in the past, colleges have said, 'Send us your money, and leave us alone,'" said Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a group that backs the petition efforts at Dartmouth. "We say, 'Sure, send your money, but also speak up.'"

Neal said Dartmouth is part of a significant trend, along with Colgate University and Hamilton College, where conservative alumni also competed for spots on school boards last year.

At Dartmouth, candidates are spending tens of thousands of dollars campaigning, unheard of in alumni elections at universities, according to Sheldon Steinbach, former general counsel of the American Council on Education.

Accountability is the wave of higher education's future. And alumni have a pivotal role to play in shaping that future.

Posted by acta online at 09:41 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Fired for tone?

Updated 4/6/07

The AAUP cautions against making collegiality a criterion for promotion review--and with good reason:

Collegiality is not a distinct capacity to be assessed independently of the traditional triumvirate of teaching, scholarship, and service. It is rather a quality whose value is expressed in the successful execution of these three functions. Evaluation in these three areas will encompass the contributions that the virtue of collegiality may pertinently add to a faculty member's career. The current tendency to isolate collegiality as a distinct dimension of evaluation, however, poses several dangers. Historically, 'collegiality' has not infrequently been associated with ensuring homogeneity, and hence with practices that exclude persons on the basis of their difference from a perceived norm. The invocation of 'collegiality' may also threaten academic freedom. In the heat of important decisions regarding promotion or tenure, as well as other matters involving such traditional areas of faculty responsibility as curriculum or academic hiring, collegiality may be confused with the expectation that a faculty member display 'enthusiasm' or 'dedication,' evince 'a constructive attitude' that will 'foster harmony,' or display an excessive deference to administrative or faculty decisions where these may require reasoned discussion. Such expectations are flatly contrary to elementary principles of academic freedom, which protect a faculty member's right to dissent from the judgments of colleagues and administrators.

A distinct criterion of collegiality also holds the potential of chilling faculty debate and discussion. Criticism and opposition do not necessarily conflict with collegiality. Gadflies, critics of institutional practices or collegial norms, even the occasional malcontent, have all been known to play an invaluable and constructive role in the life of academic departments and institutions. They have sometimes proved collegial in the deepest and truest sense. Certainly a college or university replete with genial Babbitts is not the place to which society is likely to look for leadership. It is sometimes exceedingly difficult to distinguish the constructive engagement that characterizes true collegiality from an obstructiveness or truculence that inhibits collegiality. Yet the failure to do so may invite the suppression of dissent. The very real potential for a distinct criterion of 'collegiality' to cast a pall of stale uniformity places it in direct tension with the value of faculty diversity in all its contemporary manifestations.

Lest there be any doubt about how "collegiality" may be used to suppress the free exchange of ideas, to chill debate, and even to scupper the careers of dissenters, one need only look to the case of Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson, whose department disliked his temperate, reasoned objection to some of its politicized practices and so tried to deny him tenure for failing to be properly collegial.

It looks like DePaul is revisiting the issue of whether a professor's perceived civility--or lack thereof--should figure into tenure review. Controversial political science professor Norman Finkelstein received a positive (9-3) tenure vote in his department, and a 5-0 vote in favor of tenuring him from the college-wide personnel committee.

But now a dean has stepped in, and has raised the specter of collegiality, circulating a memo opposing Finkelstein that says, in part, that "the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein's published books ... border on character assassination" and that his tone violates "some basic tenets of discourse within an academic community." The dean goes on to note that Finkelstein's tone is "inconsistent with DePaul's Vincentian values, most particularly our institutional commitment to respect the dignity of the individual and to respect the rights of others to hold and express different intellectual positions." Finkelstein's case will be definitively decided in June -- so the memo does not accompany a decision to deny tenure to him, but it does reveal that Finkelstein is encountering some potentially job-ending criticism about his personal intellectual style -- or, to put it another way, about his collegiality.

ACTA is not privy to the facts and takes no position on Finkelstein's case. Without addressing whether Finkelstein deserves tenure, there are some things to note about the dean's introduction of collegiality criteria at this stage of the process.

Even if the dean's criticisms are content neutral, motivated entirely by a dispassionate assessment of Finkelstein's scholarly manners, there is a problem here, and that has to do with how entirely abusable and subjective such assessment is. Some are already drawing a connection between the dean's opposition to Finkelstein and Finkelstein's controversial position on Israel, arguing that opposing Finkelstein on the grounds of civility is simply a cover for opposing him on the basis of his politics. And that's the rub with collegiality criteria when they appear in tenure cases -- they only really come up at times when it's not possible to distinguish a scholar's manner from his beliefs, and as such they are always already profoundly tainted.

The dean's critique of Finkelstein--which was supposed to be confidential but was leaked to the media--exemplifies how criticism of a scholar's collegiality tends to shade into opposition to his viewpoint. Discussing Finkelstein's tone, and his tendency to attack fellow scholars, the dean writes, "I find this very characteristic aspect of his scholarship to compromise its value and find it to be reflective of an ideologue and polemicist who has a rather hurtful and mean-spirited sub-text to his critical scholarship -- not only to prove his point and others wrong but, also in my opinion, in the process, to impugn their veracity, honor, motives, reputations and/or their dignity ... I see this as a very damaging threat to civil discourse in a university and in society in general." Here an unpleasant tone is taken as proof that the person taking the tone is an ideologue without an argument. But being mean is not the same thing as not being right--or it shouldn't be. The problem with the dean's argument is that on the terms he lays out (terms that are, by the by, those that have been painstakingly installed by our speech-code friendly campus culture), being mean means, by definition, that no matter what you say you are wrong.

The dean may well be right that Finkelstein's scholarly comportment is unseemly, and that it does more harm than good as an intellectual style. But making poor intellectual etiquette the basis of a tenure decision is risky business, particularly when, as here, it involves over-riding standard procedure.

The academy needs to protect the free exchange of ideas with everything it has. Without it, the academy is pointless--and as too many studies have already shown, ours is an academy that is becoming more one-sided and more close-minded by the day. Collegiality criteria are a quick route to disaster. And no matter what one thinks of Finkelstein's politics, or his scholarship, or his manners, it's crucial to be aware of the larger context framing his case.

Posted by acta online at 08:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A prediction

As yet another insurgent candidate vies for election to Dartmouth's Board of Trustees, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds makes a prediction:

If elected, Smith will be the fourth independent to join Dartmouth's board, following Todd Zywicki and Peter Robinson in 2005 and T.J. Rodgers in 2004. The school's administration is unhappy with these outside "petition" candidates - that is, outsiders supported by alumni, rather than insiders nominated by, well, the insiders. It recently tried but failed to amend the rules to make such independent runs more difficult.

Enter Smith, Dartmouth '88, who now teaches law at the University of Virginia. He says he wants to restore the Dartmouth he knew 20 years ago, one where student interaction was more independent of the university, and untainted by political correctness - what he calls a "New McCarthyism."

He says he was moved to run by some of the many recent Dartmouth grads in his classes - specifically, by their complaints about the erosion of Dartmouth's small-college experience. He thinks Dartmouth's administrators - lured by the prestige and grant-getting potential of large research-university type programs - have been shortchanging its traditional strength.

He also cites "gross mismanagement" and "bureaucratic bloat," noting that the past five years have seen a 79 percent increase in administrative spending, and 117 new administrative hires, against only 50 new faculty hires in the arts and sciences. (Administrators got bigger raises than faculty, too.)

[...]

Regardless of the outcome, I suspect that the struggles at Dartmouth presage similar happenings around the nation. Despite talk about "relevance" in the 1970s, higher education has for the past several decades become more insular, and less responsive to the interests of alumni, taxpayers and even students. Administrators have managed to secure larger budgets and less accountability - every bureaucrat's dream.

But such dreams don't last forever. Recent decades have seen one insular and unaccountable institution after another broken open - from the Big Three auto companies to securities brokerages to IBM. Now this trend toward openness and accountability - fostered in part by technology, and in part by stakeholders' unwillingness to be taken advantage of - is coming to higher education. The bumpy ride for university administrators may be just beginning.

Let it be.

Posted by acta online at 01:00 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

No bias here

A University of Wisconsin professor is teaching a business course called "Change and Changing Contexts of Management." Billed as a "comprehensive exploration of organizational behavior in its complexity, noting the impact of contemporary contextual variables and delving into systems theory and the concept of the learning community," the course finds the professor touching on controversial subjects such as global warming, corporate social responsibility, and immigration. A student notices that the professor is not handling these topics in a rounded, even-handed manner. All of the assigned readings on immigration treat the issue from what he describes as a "pro-immigration (liberal)" perspective. He writes an email to the professor, including links to sources containing alternative views on immigration.

And he gets this email in response:

I get really tired of right wing stuff. Surely you get enough of it. Do you ask for additional readings in your right wing classes. Obviously not. I resent your insulting assumption that you have the right to teach my class or that students are not familiar with right wing racist crap on immigration. Of course they are. My course is not being taught to reinforce right wing ideology. Don't you get enough of this in other classes, or do you need EVERY class to be consistent with extremist views.

This note clearly expresses the professor's intention not to treat controversial topics in a balanced manner--which amounts in turn to a clear expression of the professor's intention to violate the AAUP's stipulation that academic freedom does not permit college teachers to proselytize to students or to attack them for their views.

From the AAUP's Academic Freedom statement: "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject."

From the AAUP's Statement on Professional Ethics: "As teachers, professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students. They hold before them the best scholarly and ethical standards of their discipline. Professors demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors. ... They avoid any exploitation, harassment, or discriminatory treatment of students. ... They protect their academic freedom."

From the AAUP's Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students: "The professor in the classroom and in conference should encourage free discussion, inquiry, and expression. ... Students should be free to take reasoned exception to the data or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion, but they are responsible for learning the content of any course of study for which they are enrolled."

The email is also, from a content neutral standpoint, extraordinarily unprofessional and rude. No matter what one's politics, no professor should respond to a student's civil communication with such a blatantly nasty, loaded attack. The student notes that his grade did not suffer once the professor identified him as someone who disagreed with his politicized approach to pedagogy. That's something. But it's not everything by a long stretch, and the University of Wisconsin--which has had more than one recent scandal regarding its difficulty distinguishing free expression from indoctrination--should be concerned.

Posted by acta online at 09:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack